On June 4/5, a technical meeting of the CGM Open Consortium (http://www.cgmopen.org) took place in Frankfurt, Germany. The meeting was hosted by ITEDO Software. Most CGM Open members participated in the meeting either in person or via conference calls.

Topics included discussions about new educational material to be developed for WebCGM, interoperability, and the WebCGM Document Object Model (DOM).

CGM Open will prepare a new tutorial for the XML Conference in Baltimore in December that is more practically oriented than the first tutorial. The attendees will receive detailed information that will enable them to make WebCGM work for them. Topics include the creation of WebCGMs including graphic objects, the integration of WebCGMs into web pages, building links between text and graphic objects, and the details of WebCGM navigation. Attendees will learn how to build a simple spare parts catalog using WebCGM and HTML. Working samples will be provided on CD. The tutorial will also provide an overview over the latest developments around WebCGM, including stylable WebCGM and the WebCGM DOM. Lastly it will offer help for those who need to decide between SVG and WebCGM for their projects. The tutorial will be held by Dieter Weidenbruck and possibly other instructors from the CGM Open community.

The interoperability discussion led to several significant decisions that will be published soon. The essence is that CGM Open wants to provide help to users that have problems with moving CGM files from one program to another by providing controlled access to the involved vendors. This will ensure that CGM users will get a qualified answer within a short timeframe.

During the DOM part of the meeting it was detected that CGM Open needs to split the activities into two sections: The CGM DOM to control access to objects, and CGM style sheets to manipulate objects at runtime. The CGM DOM will help users to identify and access graphical objects, whereas the styles can be used to control the visible appearance of the object. For example, a function like document.GetObjectByID("myObj1") could be used to identify a graphical object called "myObj1", and then a style could be associated with this object like "stroke-color='255,0,0' " or similar. The work on these topics will be conducted during the next couple of months, and the results will be presented at the XML Conference in Baltimore.

The meeting demonstrated the clear interest of both vendors and CGM users to take the next step in developing CGM as a stable and reliable format for web environments.